Living a digital life with empty pockets

Occasionally you’ll see me making a completely random post on SL for Nowt that isn’t about freebies, cheapies, hints and tips, or helping newbies. Those are the posts that I title Mar’s Ponderings, and they’re usually all about me rambling on about weird stuff in Second Life.

For some time now, I’ve felt those posts don’t really belong on SL for Nowt, since they’re my personal thoughts about stuff, and SL for Nowt is kind of my ‘official face’. So I’ve created a new WordPress blog for those: Mar’s Ponderings. I’ll also be blogging over there about my non-freebie/cheapie buys; the ones that don’t belong on SL for Nowt. Please feel free to add/ignore it as you wish ;)

I doubt that I will be updating Mar’s Ponderings half as often as I do SL for Nowt, so I’ve included an at-a-glance link in the sidebar of SL for Nowt (look under the blogroll and SLurls section) so you can see the latest posts made at Mar’s Ponderings, even when you’re just browsing SL for Nowt.

I feel for you guys (as in the male of the avatar species). I really do.

I was standing in… shall we say a well-known designer store yesterday, browsing through their items. This particular store mixes their male and female items together, which makes for some interesting discoveries for the girls, but I can imagine the poor guys get frustrated when looking for male items. Especially when one considers the pectoral shading this designer seems to use on their male clothing, since it isn’t always immediately obvious what is male and what is female clothing.

I overheard two guys talking nearby, and being nosy I cammed around to see which clothing item they were looking at. It was this:

From what I heard of the conversation, they liked the clothing, but there were clear issues that one of them summed up with a single word: mantitties.

I can only agree. The clothing made by this designer is fabulous, the store is very well-known, and many of you will recognise it, however subtle I try to be, cropping out logos and suchlike in these pictures. The fact of the matter is: the pectoral shading on some of the male clothing is extremely visible and very breast-like, especially on the lighter items.

Another example:

Note the darker purple jacket looks just fine, but the lighter ones really do seem to have ‘moobs’. If I had a male avatar, I know which colour I would buy, and I find myself wondering if the designer sees higher sales for the darker colours of male items than the lighter ones.

What I do know is the store missed out on sales because of that shading. The two guys discussing the clothing seemed disappointed that the shading ‘spoiled’ the items, which they would have bought if it had been more subtle.

Any guys reading this: would you take a chance on the ‘mantitties’ in the lighter colours, or would you plump for the darker ones where they are less visible?

EDIT: Adding a screenshot of a female item of clothing, where you can see the deliberate breast shading is quite different:

My apologies if this blog has become somewhat Lemania-focused of late. This is for two reasons:

1 – The woman is a dollarbie dynamo! Honestly, I’ve never seen such a daily outpouring of generosity to match this.

2 – Real Life is kind of sucky for me right now, and I’m not getting out and about as much as I would like to. Weekends are the best time for me to tour Second Life and discover new things, but during the week it’s easier for me to stick to just a small handful of places and blog about what I find there.

Over the course of the two days it took me to complete the Twisted Hunt I met some great people, enjoyed some hilarious chat in the hunt group, and found some fabulous prizes. But also over the course of those two days I saw and heard about some pretty shoddy behaviour, and it’s that behaviour which has prompted me to write this post.

Most of this should be common sense, but it seems that a few people are lacking in common sense. Or, to put it a tad more bluntly: they’re rude. So this post is a short “Do’s and Don’ts” for treasure hunting. There are also lots of hints and tips for getting the best out of a hunt. I hope it helps some of you :)

In order to improve security for our customers, we’ve begun making a series of changes to the way security and account logins are handled at Xstreet SL. Since much of our service is money-related, it’s imperative that we tighten things up to keep your funds and your accounts safe.

The first of these changes went live yesterday. Previously, cookies stored in your web browser were used to keep account logins persistent for up to a month at a time. Now you will be required to login whenever a new “session” is started. Furthermore, if you use multiple browsers or multiple computers and log out of your account on one computer, all of the others will be logged out as well.

Over the next few days and weeks we’ll be making your accounts more secure, but this generally won’t involve noticeable functionality changes. Once we’ve reached a certain point we’ll review options for making security less intrusive by requiring logins less often.

OK, the Kissed Hunt is almost over (ends today, so if there’s anything you still need for yourself or an alt – especially those high-end items such as skins – make sure you grab them in the next couple of hours) and Mar’s inventory has rocketed up again. I got it down to around 14k items and now it’s hovering back up at 17k again. Ouch.

This weekend I’m going to be inventory-sorting and (time and tiredness permitting, because it’s been a long working week for me in RL) a new post will be going up, describing my inventory heirarchy. I’ll be blogging my way through my unpacking and sorting strategy, so let’s see if together we can clear the hunt backlog before Monday.

Also, you might want to add some L$ to your balance tonight, because this weekend is 50% off at Sn@tch.

Remember my blog post about tinting prim items of clothing so they match up with the system items in an outfit? Once the current Release Candidate 1.22 viewer goes ‘gold’ (that is, once it’s the standard viewer) you’ll no longer have to do this! (Actually, what you’ll have to do is go back and un-tint all your tinted prim items.) Why?

JIRA issue # VWR-8012 – Gray shading all over clothing and avatars in world since the Windlight roll out has been fixed. What this means is that the techie guys at Linden Lab have changed the avatar mesh base colour from grey to white. And with that one change, you’ll see your clothing items the same colour as the prim items; they won’t have that grey cast to them anymore. Skins will be lighter, too.

This will, however, likely bring up new issues. Skin designers that have compensated for this grey cast by brightening their skins may face a complete re-doing of their lighter skintone lines. And those of us that wince when we come across megawatt facelights in SL are going to suffer a lot ;)

Here’s a link you’ll find useful. It’s the link that I followed and found out about this fix from (thanks, Caliah!) – Optimising Windlight for Avatars 2.0. Whether you want a good Windlight preset for taking photos, or whether you just want to see less over-brightness around you, this is a great tutorial.

The (group-only) lucky chair at Silent Sparrow is a little bit different this month. It’s not giving out the whole suite of clothing for guys and girls; instead it’s giving out either the girls’ version or the boys’ version. (You can still buy the whole suite from the board right beside the chair, if you can’t wait or if your letter just never comes up.)

The great thing about hya’s clothes is that, even in the mens’ sets, she includes things such as cuffs and collars and coat tails fitted for female avatars as well as the men. But ladies, although we can comfortably wear the guys’ versions, they can’t quite comfortably wear the girls’ version! So if a male avatar is hovering around the chair with the same initial as you, and the chair comes up with that initial on the guys’ outfit? Be nice and let him hop on. You get much more choice than he does.

And if you’re the only one when your initial comes up on the guys’ outfit? Go for it, because it looks awesome on the girls, too.

About

About SL for Nowt

So what is SL for Nowt all about? (Hey, that rhymed…)

Initially, I wanted to see if it was possible to create an entirely new avatar in the Second Life world, without putting in any money of my own. I planned to do this by picking money from money trees only. No camping (sitting on chairs/mopping floors/doing other activities that make an area look busy, in return for small amounts of cash), and definitely no begging! I set myself the goal of a minimum 50L$ per day from the money trees, and met this target on most days. I even exceeded it a lot on a few days. Along the way, I spotted (and screencaptured) many odd things, met some interesting people, got annoyed at the rudeness of ’some people’ and generally had a fun time.

The blog has now taken a different path, since my original goals have now been met. Now, SL for Nowt is all about finding freebies and cheapies, living a virtual existence in the Second Life world on the cheap, and helping out newbies as much as possible.

SL for Nowt has moved away from WordPress hosting, as I was unhappy with WordPress inserting ads into my content that I had no control over. It’s now self-hosted, so please hop over and pay a visit to the new blog!

Disclaimer

SL for Nowt is an entirely unofficial blogsite, and is not endorsed by Linden Research, Inc.